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Saina: 'I wanted to do more'

Grit could be Saina Nehwal’s second name. After struggling with middling form and nagging injuries that have hampered her progress in the last few years, the badminton champion stormed back into the limelight this year by laying claim to the coveted World Number 1 rankings once again in August this year and by winning five titles. Sania has the enviable record of having won 22 international titles including eight Superseries ones, a silver at the 2015 World Championships and Olympic, Asian and Commonwealth Games medals.

She won the 2015 India Open Grand Prix Gold by defeating Spain's Carolina Marin in the final and became the first Indian woman badminton player to reach the finals of the All England Open Badminton Championships—she lost the championship to Carolina in the final. In March she won her maiden women's singles title at the India Open BWF Super Series beating Ratchanok Intanon of Thailand.

Ever the perfectionist, Sania said in a PTI interview earlier this year, "Being world number one is the most satisfying while being runners up in three events in a year is not very encouraging to my personal career. This year is also one of the best but more was to be done by me. I wish I would have been free of injuries. It is an important component of badminton. Almost all the girls in international badminton were doing well in the tournaments."

Most recently, she crashed out of the BWF Superseries Finals in Dubai in her final league match to Tai Tzu-ying of Chinese Taipei. However, her stupendous win against Carolina Marin during the tournament has critics and fans claiming a return to the Saina Nehwal of old who slayed the top seeds without ever being intimidated. “I don’t know how to explain it. I never expected to play like this. I went in with no expectations as I had not trained in the last three weeks due to my Achilles injury. But it was one of my best wins,” Nehwal said after the match.

Saina Nehwal comes from Jat family of Haryana, a region known for its skewed male-to-female ratio, and is seen not just as one of the country’s top sportswomen but also as a role model for young women all over the country. With the staunch support of her parents, who moved to first Hyderabad and now Bengaluru so that she could have the best training, Saina is only the second Indian after Prakash Padukone to have achieved the top ranking in Badminton and is also the first Indian to have won an Olympic medal (bronze) in the sport in London in 2012. Fiercely patriotic, she has been quoted as saying that her Olympic medal is of immense importance to her, even more than her world number 1 ranking.

“I started playing because I saw my parents play in Hisar. I was never competitive about the game; just that I wanted to do better than others. I didn’t have any role models and the game wasn’t a life-and-death matter to me. My mother, a state champion from Haryana, would give me inputs and luckily, I could always work extra hard and wouldn’t get tired even after a whole day’s training,” said Saina to Forbes magazine. She has gone up by 10 places to No 39 in the 2015 Forbes India Celebrity 100 List with earnings of Rs 16.99 crores. She endorses 14 brands, and is a bigger brand than many cricketers.

Saina, who went through one of the worst phases of her career last year, has often said that Indian sportswomen could reach even greater heights if they had access to better infrastructure and the best coaches. The champion trains for eight hours a day and has little time for little else. However, her secret indulgence is Bollywood films, especially ones that star Shahrukh Khan. Saina had her fangirl moment in September this year when she tweeted to Shahrukh asking him if he would meet her when he was in Hyderabad to shoot for Dilwale. The superstar promptly agreed. Selfies of a beaming Sania after the meeting was evidence that this was one more dream achieved for Sania!